It's fun, it's goofy... it's scientific papers that probably shouldn't be published anywhere else! Here they are, for worldwide open discussion and peer review! Some of it is news... some of it is strange... we just report it!

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Human Origins

Author: Robert Bruce Baird

The issue of human evolution going back at least 9,000,000 (nine million) years and possibly even being upright by that time is another of the facts which when in my youth seemed totally ridiculous. Actually many mystics said it goes back twelve million years to when what could be called the missing link occurred. The matter of whether we descended from apes is still up in the air and more importantly it would appear the mystics were right about cross-breeding and shamanistic attunements to affect such things in many life forms. These qualitative or spiritual changes are reflected in an individuals life as they now prove the brain itself can evolve and change structure with the studies of Buddhist Monks and concert pianists or the likes of Hank Wesselmann who was helped by his shaman wife. Hanks brainwavelength is more controllably able to reach the same frequency as psychic surgeons and top Yogis as shown in a University of Illinois study.

I was touting the importance of Flores Island and the sea travel technology for years before the recent discovery of the Hobbit-like creature there. Some researchers say it is a cross between a chimp and a hominid. That would dovetail with the also currently-being-researched Bonobos who are a cross between a chimp and a gorilla. The Portuguese baby that is half Neanderthal is proof of cross-breeding despite the fact that these attunements are not traceable through DNA analysis as I see it. The following excerpt from an article in 2004 does not mention that researchers of human lice are now going on to check pubic lice in order to prove cross mating occurred. There will be debate no matter what they find but I think it speaks to much of the sex magic in Tantra and Dragon or serpent lore including what Sir Laurence Gardner and the Rosicrucians have written about.

But it turns out that DNA analysis shows there are two distinct sub-species of head lice in humans. All over the world, except in western North America, they are the same. But there is a population of lice along the Pacific coast of North America which have been evolving separately from the rest of the world for about 1.8m years. The only way to make sense of this is to assume that their separate development took place on Homo erectus, who also split off from our hominid ancestors about that time ago.

So how could these lice have reached their present, wholly human hosts? It seems to me that this could only have happened through some act of primal genocide when Homo erectus met Homo sapiens somewhere in eastern Siberia. Lice can only travel between living bodies, or very freshly dead ones. If the transmission had been from living bodies, we would expect the same pattern in bodily lice. It isn't there. Nor is there any trace of Homo erectus in our DNA. So the lice must have come from very fresh corpses and it is hard to suppose that they had died peacefully just before the intruders turned up. The story of ""Ebu Gogo"" sounds more improving. According to local villagers, these creatures were around until about a century ago: three feet tall, hairy, and speechless, though they could imitate human speech, like parrots. The villagers tolerated them and even fed them, though they would only eat raw food, until they stole and ate a baby. They drove them from their cave with blazing bales of grass. Shortly thereafter, the villagers themselves moved off and western settlers arrived. The cave where the Ebu Gogo lived has not been found. But if it is - and scientists are looking - it might yield some extraordinary remains.

These wouldn't be technological. Perhaps the saddest aspect of the whole story is the slow loss of technology it implies. Ebu Gogo seems to have been a descendent of Homo erectus, also known as Java man, who reached the island about 840,000 years ago. This was almost certainly something that required boats, which seem a pretty human-level technology.

But because Flores is so far from anywhere that only boat-users or very strong swimmers - like elephants - can reach it, the mammals there seem to have shrunk to cope with the lack of food. The tiny hominids hunted a race of dwarf elephants, and ate for preference their babies, whose charred bones have been found in the cave. So they had fire once. They had tools, too; and presumably language. But their brains had shrunk to a quarter of the size of ours.

The Ebu Gogo recorded by the villagers had forgotten what language was for; they used no tools, and ate their food raw. At some stage, perhaps, their brains had shrunk so much that they were no longer truly human. The moral seems hard to escape. What makes us human is not our moral qualities. Ultimately, it's a question of getting enough to eat to grow the brains that are big enough for morality - and, indeed, genocide. * Andrew Brown is the author of The Darwin Wars: The Scientific War for the Soul of Man and In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite. He also maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog (http://www.thewormbook.com/helmintholog/). (1)

The day after I posted the above I found that science now proves mamals were not only living far longer ago than we thought but they were evolved enough to be eating small dinosaurs. This makes it possible to speculate about an even older cultured mammal on earth as well as the probability that earlier hominids were more evolved than we thought.